My best friend in elementary school, his dad was shot in the stomach though our bathroom door.
My older sister in law was shot four times, three in the torso one in the head.
My younger sister in law was stabbed three times, one going through the spleen and lung.
My college roommate shot himself in the right temple.
Mac hung himself after Patti suicided.
The list of dead goes on like this for seventeen names, starting when I was 6. Natural causes do not make the list.

The world is what it is, but what is not right, under stress, I revert to this being the normal and expected behavior.
The reactions this entails at times is so far from right I find large holes in my memories.

Some seem intent on making this everyone's new normal...That ain't right.

That's crazy. I live in Australia and I only know one person who owns a gun, and that's for feral animal management.

The gun violence problem is wayyyy overblown by the media... if you added up every mass shooting that ever happened in our country it'd be roughly 1-2000 people in the past several decades. Whilst at the same time EVERY YEAR 1.3 MILLION people die in car crashes, 450 thousand die from tobacco usage, 300,000 from obesity, and 88,000 alcohol-related deaths. Imagine if the news ran a headline every time an alchoholic bought a bottle or a fat dude went through the drive through, and did a big piece on the "epidemic" of deep frier violence.

Everybody has an agenda and the powers that be want a disarmed population. Anti-gun people are uninformed alarmists who didn't pass statistics in high school, otherwise they might understand that guns violence doesn't even crack the top 10 for causes of death in the US, but seems to make the nightly news whenever the political narrative ties into their pussy view of the world

__________________
"I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." Thomas Jefferson

"One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all""

The gun violence problem is wayyyy overblown by the media... if you added up every mass shooting that ever happened in our country it'd be roughly 1-2000 people in the past several decades. Whilst at the same time EVERY YEAR 1.3 MILLION people die in car crashes, 450 thousand die from tobacco usage, 300,000 from obesity, and 88,000 alcohol-related deaths. Imagine if the news ran a headline every time an alchoholic bought a bottle or a fat dude went through the drive through, and did a big piece on the "epidemic" of deep frier violence.

Everybody has an agenda and the powers that be want a disarmed population. Anti-gun people are uninformed alarmists who didn't pass statistics in high school, otherwise they might understand that guns violence doesn't even crack the top 10 for causes of death in the US, but seems to make the nightly news whenever the political narrative ties into their pussy view of the world

I generally stay out of firearm discussions because there is no convincing those with their minds set to do away with 'evil' firearms. Personally, I'm armed at home and in my vehicle. I don't live in the best neighborhood.

I think the fear and loathing of guns is probably two-fold; 1. These shootings are violent acts as opposed to illnesses and accidents., 2. It's a control issue... Big Brother doesn't want us armed. It's been proven time-after-time, with the lack of firearms, killers resort to some other form of violence... knives, bombs, poison, large vehicles driven into crowds plowing people down, etc. Guns aren't the issue. If a lunatic is hell-bent on killing people he/she has many other ways to do it. The type of gun is insignificant, despite how mass media spins the facts. Large capacity magazines are meaningless because a person can carry thirty ten round magazines and change them so rapidly that they can shoot nearly as quickly as using five sixty round magazines. Magazine change literally takes one second.

The deadliest mass shooting in Texas happened just a few months ago only a few miles from me. I passed right by that church one day before it happened. What most people don't know (and perhaps refuse to acknowledge) is the man who stopped the killer used an 'evil' AR-15 to do so. Will anyone hail the AR-15 as a 'good' firearm because it was, as usual, use for something good? No, they won't. People are too brainwashed.

Okay, back to your regular 'programming'. Feel free to PM all angry messages to prevent further derailment of this thread. I promise I won't reply... please don't be offended when I don't.